The latest outrage in Egypt has been,
like all the others, almost universally ignored by the international media and
human rights groups. Wafaa Constantine Messiha, wife of a Coptic priest in Egypt, was abducted by jihadist Muslims and forced to convert to Islam. The Mubarak regime has done nothing. This is no isolated
incident: Wilfred Wong of the Jubilee Campaign, a Christian human rights group,
notes that “the attempts to force Christians to convert to Islam in Egypt are
on the increase and the methods are getting increasingly varied and well
organized. Some of these forced conversions are carried out by Muslim
individuals, with the help of their friends, while others are being conducted
by well funded groups.”

The situation has gotten so bad for Copts
in Egypt that Pope Shenouda III, the leader of the
Coptic Church, recently spoke out boldly about one common method of abduction
and forced conversion: “I have received so many letters about what’s happening
to the Christian girls who go to supermarket stores to shop. At the store they
tell them that they have won and have to go upstairs to receive their award or
prize. After that we don’t know what’s happening to these girls upstairs. There
is a lot of talking going on about this matter, and I see that what’s happening
will create a religious clash in the country. I’m urging the police to take a
serious action against what’s happening.”

But
the police did nothing, and the Copts are getting increasingly fed up.
According to Emil Zaki of the U.S. Copts Association,
“The situation in Egypt is exploding every minute for the last three days.
Muslims are regularly attacking Copts, and they kidnapped the wife of a priest
to force her to convert to Islam.” Three thousand demonstrators gathered last
Sunday and Monday in four Egyptian provinces to protest the Mubarak
regime’s inaction in the Wafaa Constantine Messiha case and its general indifference to the
persecution of the Copts. Says Michael Meunier,
president of the U.S. Copts Association: “Mubarak’s
regime has not only ignored, but in many cases contributed to the alarming
increase in anti-Coptic violence.”

Actions
against Christians not only in Egypt, but all over the Middle East, are usually
ascribed these days to anti-U.S. sentiment in the wake of the invasion of Iraq
— when they’re reported at all. But such incidents are far older than the U.S.
presence in Iraq; they have been going on for decades, even centuries.
According to the Jubilee Campaign, in the late 1990s Coptic Christians
uncovered evidence of houses in which “different teams of Muslims were working
to pressure or force Christians to convert to Islam.” They found “a very
organized and systematic approach by these Muslims to waylaying and forcing
Egyptian Christians to convert to Islam.”

This is just one manifestation of the
discrimination and harassment that Christians and other non-Muslims still face
all over the Islamic world. Even though the laws of many Muslim-majority
nations guarantee equality of rights and freedom of conscience, in practice
Christians face discrimination and harassment — and even, on occasion,
penalties derived from Sharia, Islamic law. Sometimes
the secular law gives way to Sharia even if Sharia is not on the books. One notorious example was the
case of Robert Hussein Qambar Ali, a Kuwaiti who
converted from Islam to Christianity in the 1990s. He was arrested and tried
for apostasy, even though the Kuwaiti Constitution guarantees the freedom of
religion and says nothing about the traditional Islamic prohibition on
conversion to another faith. One of Hussein’s prosecutors explained: “With
grief I have to say that our criminal law does not include a penalty for
apostasy. The fact is that the legislature, in our humble opinion, cannot
enforce a penalty for apostasy any more or less than what our Allah and his
messenger have decreed. The ones who will make the decision about his apostasy
are: our Book, the Sunna, the agreement of the
prophets and their legislation given by Allah.”

As
Islamic radicalism increases, Muslims grow increasingly less tolerant toward
their non-Muslim neighbors. But the world continues to take no notice, either
of poor Wafaa
Constantine Messiha or of the larger situation. The
“white man’s burden” of colonial days has now been reversed, such that in the
conceptual framework of the UN and the international media, only Westerners can
do evil, and Christians cannot possibly play the role of victim. The sooner the
world casts off these blinkered Chomskyite/Saidist
fantasies, the better off we’ll all be.